Exploring Digital Heritage: Designing Local Archives in the ‘Israel Revealed’ Project
Keywords:
Heritage collections, Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Local communities, National heritage, Digital heritage archive, People and technologyAbstract
The democratization of heritage through digital access is a well-documented aspiration. Its goal is to facilitate greater public participation and access to heritage collections. This paper presents the results of ethnographic research that explored the initiative for documentation and digitization of family photo albums. The project, entitled ‘Israel Revealed to the Eye’, is under the auspices of the Yad Ben-Zvi Institute. Its purpose is to record and scan visual representations in order to create a depository of family photo albums. The work is carried out by dedicated volunteers.
The article explores to what extent the project allowed the local communities to take part in the decision-making behind the meaning of heritage and the content of the digitization. The argument is made that the communities’ participation in the decisions that shaped the archive, and its values and visual representations, was channeled to a predefined framework in the national heritage discourse.
The authors pose a theoretical framework based on heritage studies and actornetwork theory to unpack the digital heritage archive and examine the interaction between the people involved and the technologies and methods employed.
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